In the new issue of Regulation, economist Pierre Lemieux argues that the recent oil price decline is at least partly the result of increased supply from the extraction of shale oil. The increased supply allows the economy to produce more goods, which benefits some people, if not all of them. Thus, contrary to some commentary in the press, cheaper oil prices cannot harm the economy as a whole.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

Tag: paul ryan

Today’s Arena question boils down to this: are Americans able to handle the truth—that we’re going broke, as Paul Ryan puts it, plainly. P.T. Barnum allegedly said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Unfortunately, voters too often prove him right.

As I implied in my post yesterday, Robin Hood Democrats, promising “free goods” provided by the rich, are betting that Americans are too stupid to see through their many scams. Their cynicism is as boundless as their politics of personal destruction. To take the simplest example, in June 2009, and often since, Obama assured us: “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: … If you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your healthcare plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” As Professors Richard Epstein and David Hyman have shown, he’s already broken that promise in multiple ways.

But give the president his due: he makes Robin Hood look like a piker. His latest? In Iowa yesterday he announced that the federal government will purchase over $150 million in meat and fish to help ranchers survive the drought. “That food is going to be spent by folks over at the Pentagon and other places.” Never mind that you don’t “spend food,” this is simply shades of Solyndra—the flimflammery that runs through this feckless administration. But the main question is, will Americans fall for it again?

Surprisingly, President Obama’s first direct attack on Paul Ryan since the congressman’s selection as Mitt Romney VP nominee doesn’t involve the threat of grandma being pushed off a cliff. Instead, it involves the latest farm bill, which has too many subsidies and food-stamp increases for House Republicans’ tastes (good for them).

Now, I’m no expert in agriculture policy – for more on farm bills and related disasters, I recommend my colleague Sallie James’s work – but one provision in the disputed legislation caught my eye: Apparently the federal government plans to buy over $150 million of meat and fish. Sounds like a great cookout, but what gives the government the power to do that? Where exactly is the Constitution’s BBQ Clause?

If only President Obama could take a page from another embattled Democratic president facing a drought-stricken nation: In 1887, Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill appropriating $10,000 for seeds for suffering Texas farmers, saying, “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.” (For more on that and other similar examples, see this report from 10 years ago this month.)

In today’s Washington Post, the paper’s Dana Milbank treats us to “A faith-based lesson for Paul Ryan.” He takes Ryan to task for his Georgetown University speech last Thursday defending the House Republican budget. Earlier, it seems, Ryan had told the Christian Broadcasting Network that his budget was crafted “using my Catholic faith” as inspiration. That was more than the reliably liberal U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops could bear. Never shy about instructing Congress on the moral dimensions of the federal budget, the bishops wrote to Members, Milbank notes,

saying that the Ryan budget, passed by the House, “fails to meet” the moral criteria of the Church, namely its view that any budget should help “the least of these” as the Christian Bible requires: the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the jobless. “A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons.”

“To their credit,” Milbank continues, “Catholic leaders were not about to let Ryan claim to be serving God when in fact he was serving mammon.” And he adds that a group of Jesuit scholars and other Georgetown faculty members had already written to Ryan to say that his budget “appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

No shrinking violet, Ryan met his critics head-on with a lengthy defense of his budget on both factual and moral grounds. As Milbank quotes him:

the faculty members would benefit from a “fact-based conversation” on the issue. “I suppose that there are some Catholics who for a long time thought they had a monopoly … on the social teaching of our church,” … but no more. “The work I do as a Catholic holding office conforms to the social doctrine as best I can make of it.”

Not so, says Milbank, but he never grapples with the pressing economic facts that Ryan set out, preferring instead to speak of the bishops’ “rebuke” to Ryan’s “fanaticism.” He quotes Ryan’s “challenge to the theologians’ theology”—“The holy father himself, Pope Benedict, has charged that governments, communities and individuals running up high debt levels are ‘living at the expense of future generations’”—but then rests content to conclude that “even Jesus said to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” omitting the pope’s final words: we are “living in untruth.”

The bishops, too, are living in untruth. Just as they failed to grasp that their promotion of Obama’s health care overhaul would entail intractable questions about abortion and contraceptive coverage, so too they fail here to grasp not only the economic implications of our burgeoning welfare state but the moral implications of the pope’s point—that just as it is wrong to live at the expense of future generations, so too is it wrong to live at the expense of our neighbors, which is the ultimate point toward which Ryan is driving. And no biblical story captures that point better than the parable of the Good Samaritan.

A year ago, when the new 111th Congress was first wrestling with these same issues, I wrote in the Wall Street Journal that people like Milbank and the bishops

ask, implicitly, how “we” should spend “our” money, as though we were one big family quarreling over our collective assets. We’re not. We’re a constitutional republic, populated by discrete individuals, each with our own interests. Their question socializes us and our wherewithal. The Framers’ Constitution freed us to make our own individual choices.

The irony is that Jesus, properly understood, saw this clearly — both when he asked us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s, and when he spoke of the Good Samaritan. [Milbank and the bishops] imagine that the Good Samaritan parable instructs us to attend to the afflicted through the coercive government programs of the modern welfare state. It does not. The Good Samaritan is virtuous not because he helps the fallen through the force of law but because he does so voluntarily, which he can do only if he has the right to freely choose the good, or not.

Americans are a generous people. They will help the less fortunate if left free to do so. What they resent is being forced to do good — and in ways that are not only inefficient but impose massive debts upon their children. That’s not the way free people help the young and less fortunate.

Far from “fanatical,” Ryan’s budget, respecting the bounds of the politically possible, is a responsible approach to addressing the bipartisan budgetary sins of the past. It rejects the path that “dissolves the common good of society, and dishonors the dignity of the human person,” Ryan told the Georgetown audience. And it offers a better path than we’ve been on, a path “consistent with the timeless principles of our nation’s founding and, frankly, consistent with how I understand my Catholic faith.” By returning power to individuals, families, and communities, he concluded, “we put our trust in people, not in government.”

Mr. Obama’s attack, in a speech during a lunch with editors and reporters from The Associated Press, was part of a broader indictment of the Republican economic blueprint for the nation. The Republican budget, and the philosophy it represents, he said in remarks prepared for delivery, is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to work for it.” …“Disguised as a deficit reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It’s nothing but thinly veiled social Darwinism,” Mr. Obama said. “By gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training, research and development — it’s a prescription for decline.”

I’m particularly amused by the President’s demagoguery that Ryan’s plan is “antithetical to our entire history” and “a radical vision.”

Is he really unaware that a small and constrained central government is part of America’s history and vision? Doesn’t he know that the federal government, for two-thirds of our nation’s history, consumed less than 5 percent of GDP?

Of course, that was back in the dark ages when people in Washington actually believed that the Constitution’s list of enumerated powers in Article 1, Section 8, actually enumerated the powers of the federal government. How quaint.

As has become an annualtradition, my colleague Charles Zakaib has sifted through the data from the latest edition of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ The Military Balance and created several illuminating charts. They are enclosed below and show U.S. security spending as a share of the global total, U.S. per capita spending as compared with some of our leading allies, and U.S. spending vs. the rest of NATO as a share of GDP.

The data demonstrate that Americans in 2010 spent vastly more in every sense of the term. We accounted for 47.65 percent of global security spending. We each spent more than $2,200 on the Pentagon’s budget, and hundreds more when you factor in other security spending (e.g., Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and nuclear weapons). That represents a 72 percent increase in real, inflation-adjusted dollars since 1998, whereas the United Kingdom and Denmark increased by 5 and 6 percent, respectively. Six NATO countries saw per capita spending decline: Italy’s has fallen by 35 percent since 1998; France by 14 percent; and 12 percent in Portugal. The aggregate numbers paint a similar picture: between 1999 and 2010, U.S. spending as a share of GDP rose from 3.15 to 4.77, whereas the rest of NATO declined from 2.05 to 1.61 percent.

The reason why those trends prevail is straightforward: people aren’t inclined to pay for something if someone else is willing to buy it for them. Conservatives understand that dynamic when it applies to housing allowances or food stamps for the less fortunate here in the United States. They ignore it when it applies to buying security for the relatively well off in Europe and Asia.

That blindness is evident in Paul Ryan’s latest budget plan. As Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven observed earlier this week, Ryan is willing to reduce spending on many domestic programs, but he could have gone much further on the grounds that the federal government does many things that are more appropriately handled by state or local governments or, even better, by the private sector.

Ryan makes an exception for the Pentagon, allowing its budget to grow on top of the massive increases from the past decade. Ryan and others contend that national defense is a core function of government, and therefore should not be treated equally with spending on other programs that are not.

I agree: The Constitution clearly stipulates that the federal government should provide for the “common defence.” It makes no mention of subsidizing mortgages, Amtrak, or sugar. But I anxiously await Rep. Ryan’s explanation for why American taxpayers should be expected to subsidize social welfare spending in other countries. By relieving other governments from their solemn obligation to provide for the common defense of their citizens, we have allowed and encouraged them to divert their resources elsewhere.

Chris Edwards provided an ample overview of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget proposal, so I won’t rehash the numbers. Instead, I’ll just add a few comments.

Democrats and the left will squeal that Paul Ryan’s budget proposal is a massive threat to the poor, the sick, the elderly, etc, etc. It’s baloney, but a part of me thinks that he might deserve it. Why? Because the excessive rhetoric employed by the left to criticize lower spending levels for domestic welfare programs isn’t much different than the excessive rhetoric Ryan uses to argue against sequestration-induced reductions in military spending. For instance, Ryan speaks of the “devastation to America’s national security” that sequestration would allegedly cause. (See Christopher Preble’s The Pentagon Budget: Myth vs. Reality).

Now I’m sure that I’ll receive emails admonishing me for failing to recognize that the Constitution explicitly gives the federal government the responsibility to defend the nation while the constitutionality of domestic welfare programs isn’t quite so clear. Okay, but what are Ryan’s views on the constitutionality of domestic welfare programs?

At the outset of Ryan’s introduction to his plan, he quotes James Madison and says that the Founders designed a “Constitution of enumerated powers, giving the federal government broad authority over only those matters that must have a single national response, while sharply restricting its authority to intrude on those spheres of activity better left to the states and the people.” That’s nice, but then he proceeds to make statements like this:

But when government mismanagement and political cowardice turn this element of the social contract into an empty promise, seniors are threatened with denied access to care and the next generation is threatened with a debt that destroys its hard earned prosperity. Both consequences would violate President Lyndon B. Johnson’s pledge upon signing the Medicare law: ‘No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine…No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents, and to their uncles, and their aunts.’ To fulfill Johnson’s pledge in the 21st century, America’s generations-old health and retirement security programs must be saved and strengthened.

Social contract? Well, so much for those enumerated limits on federal power.

Ryan’s “Statement of Constitutional and Legal Authority” only cites Congress’s general power to tax and spend. Based on the contents of his proposal, which would do little to rein in the federal government’s scope, one could conclude that Ryan’s view of federal power is almost as expansive as that of his Democratic colleagues. Yes, Ryan would reduce the size of government by reducing federal spending as a percentage of GDP. But as I often point out, promises to reduce spending in the future don’t mean a lot when you have a federal government that has the ability to spend money on pretty much any activity that it wants. And under Ryan’s plan, the federal government would be able to continue spending money on pretty much any activity that it wants.

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has introduced his annual budget blueprint. The plan will likely pass the House but won’t become law this year.

However, the plan signals the direction that House Republicans want to go in budget battles with the Democrats this year, and it also shows the likely thrust of policy under a possible Republican president next year.

Here are a few highlights:

Total federal outlays would fall from $3,624 billion this year to $3,530 billion next year. Those figures are $24 billion less than under President Obama’s budget this year and $187 billion next year.

Of the $187 billion savings compared to Obama next year, $38 billion would come from discretionary programs, $146 billion from so-called entitlements, and $3 billion from interest costs.

Ryan’s proposed spending in 2022 of $4,888 billion would be a modest 13 percent less than Obama’s proposed spending that year. That’s a useful statistic to remember when you read the inevitable stories about how Ryan would slash, burn, and pillage the government safety net.

Indeed, Ryan’s proposed increase in federal spending from $3,624 billion this year to $4,888 by 2022 represents fairly robust annual average growth of three percent.

As a share of GDP, the Ryan budget would trim outlays from 23.4 percent this year to 19.8 percent by 2022. That reduction would simply get spending back to around the normal historical level. And note that spending would still be higher than the 18.2 percent achieved in the last two years under President Clinton.

Ryan would repeal the 2010 health care law and reform Medicare by transitioning to a consumer-choice model. Those changes are expected to reduce annual outlays in 2022 by $258 billion.

Perhaps a more important proposal is the block-granting of Medicaid and other entitlement programs such as food stamps. Those Ryan reforms would save $313 billion annually by 2022.

Converting entitlements to block grants would allow the federal government to clamp down on federal costs while giving the states strong incentives to improve program efficiency.

The Ryan budget does not propose Social Security reform. Paul Ryan favors major reforms to this program, but he apparently thinks that reforming health care and other entitlements is a higher priority right now.

Aside from a few obvious targets—such as high-speed rail and the 2010 health care law—the Ryan budget shies away from abolishing specific programs, agencies, and departments.

Too often the Ryan budget proposes to fix broken programs when the proper reform would be elimination. Ryan proposes to “consolidate” federal job-training programs, for example, but these programs have a history of failure over the last five decades. Furthermore, job training is not a proper federal role within the U.S. constitutional structure.

In sum, Ryan’s proposals would make modest reforms to the giant federal welfare state. By Washington standards the Ryan plan is bold, and Paul Ryan certainly deserves his reputation as the sharpest and most energetic budget reformer on Capitol Hill.

However, there is too much happy talk in the Ryan plan about how failed big-government programs can be made to work better, and not enough focus on terminating activities that are properly state, local, and private in nature.